Finnish Activists May Force Parliament To Vote On Crowdsourced New Copyright Law

from the us-lobbyists-aren't-going-to-like-that-at-all dept

Well this is interesting. Kevin Collier over at DailyDot has alerted us to the news that Finland may be on the way to crowdsourcing a new copyright law. Finland has an "Open Ministry" effort that requires the Parliament vote on any citizen-proposed bill that gets 50,000 signatures within a period of six months. It's similar to the US's "We The People" petitions, except rather than getting back (maybe) a bland and useless "response" from the executive branch, the Parliament has to actually vote on the drafted legislation. The group Common Sense in Copyright has put forth a proposal entitled To Make Sense of the Copyright Act, which launched with tremendous fanfare in Finland, such that the proposed bill -- which is still being drafted -- is "by far the best-rated and most-commented" bill on the site. The current draft would push back on copyright law extremes:

The bill's aims are sweeping, and includes reducing criminal penalties for copyright infringement, broadens the definition of fair use, and increases citizens' ability to digitally copy their own material for fair use.

If it reaches the 50,000 vote total, you can expect big content lobbyists to go crazy in protesting how horrible all of this would be. But, it sure would be an interesting case study to see how those in Parliament choose to vote on a bill so widely supported by the public.

Re:

In the US the people also has that ability, although in a different form.

You need to draft the law and then elect people who will make it into law.

But maybe this is not all necessary, people could just draft the laws and say to congress, here crazy people vote on this or face the next elections.

Remember the Tea Party they elected a lot of people, they just didn't made any laws and left everything to the incompetent people they elected to solve all those problems.

By incompetent I mean people who are not competent in some area of expertise, sure most people are experts on something they just aren't experts on everything and so they can't do it all by themselves, this was true a thousand years ago and it is true today.

Wanna know how companies control the government?
They control the "experts" in each and every area that the government listen to, this is why electing people is not good enough.

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what do you mean they didn't make any laws? from gutting labor to redrawing districts in their favor, to educating us all about legitimate rape... the tea party candidates have been busy little asshats.

what way do you think the politicians will vote? at a rough guess, it will be the way they are paid to vote, as always. the difference this time, hopefully, will be that if they go against the wishes of the people, there could be severe repercussions, as there was over ACTA. that would be interesting then to see if the studio and label lobbyists could force the result they want when the politicians ass is on the line! i doubt if there are enough 'alternative employment positions' available in the industries to cater for all that could lose their jobs!

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You know, it boggles the mind how other countries would actually care if any of them made that list. Heck, if anything I'd think it would be more of a badge of honor, a way to show other countries 'We stood up to the U.S. to such a degree they made it official'.

current stats

Google translation for the petition stats. They are currently at about 16% of their needed signatures. But are collecting several thousand per day. If this rate continues, they should have no trouble reaching the 50,000 threshold in the first month.

==========

Collected to date
Ministry of Finance in the open 206 pcs
Collected about the rest of 7794 pcs
Collected a total of about 8,000 units (estimate)
Target collected about 16.0%
Estimate of the number of updated 25/01/2013
(The rest of the collected amounts are estimates, and about once a week to update the information.)
Collected an average of 2,666.7 units / day
At this rate the collection will probably take a total of 18.8 days
So, still 15.8 days
Objective would be approximately 2/9/2013
At this rate there is time to collect messages before the end date

Re: current stats

18 hours ago, when I was doing the translation stuff for the Torrentfreak piece (http://torrentfreak.com/finlands-crowdsourced-copyright-law-proposal-130124/ ) the estimated target date was Feb 18th with 7.2% done.

glad to see the rate's INCREASING not decreasing, as you'd expect ('the first 5% is always the easiest')

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"Wonder what happens when they wake up and realize that will put them in conflict with their international treaty obligations related to copyright? Oooops, sorry to spoil the fun!!!"

If the will of the people says that those international treaties are completely bogus... well... then, time to ditch the treaties.

That's a nice theory, but these treaties are generally a basket of things. Godd things like increased trade opportunities and responsibilities like living up to copyright standards. You can't simply chose to enjoy the beneficial aspects and dump the ones you don't like. Moreover, many treaties come with sanction provisions for failing to implement/enforce standards. Other than that, seems rock-solid.

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Probably the same sort of thing that happened in 2001 when the US realised that they really didn't want to follow the International Criminal Court, and so passed a law (American Service-Members Protection Act) against it.

Or Israel and the 4th Geneva Convention...

Or a mountain of other laws.

BTW, the law involved in this wasn't due to a treaty, but due to an EU directive. I suggest you actually read the proposal (although have Advil handy, doing so yesterday gave me a real headache; silly Finnish language, why can't you be easy [for me] to read like Swedish, or German, or Portuguese?)

Re: Re:

"Protection of intellectual property rights is provided for not only multilaterally in the TRIPS Agreement and through agreements administered by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) but also through bilateral agreements concluded by trading partners."

This passage came from Finland's trade related website. While the law may have been a result of an EU directive, that doesn't mean revoking it doesn't have treaty (and other) implications.

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You do understand what treaties actually are don't you, and that they can be revoked at any time by each sovereignty that is a party to them?

And if your comeback is "oh but then they will suffer huge ramifications" then you really have no clue and need to look at how the USA breaches treaties every single day with no (or very minimal) ramifications.

That 50,000 figure

It is worth noting that the 50,000 required to get this to happen is actually roughly 1% of the entire population of Finland. If the US adopted the same proportion for addressing petitions, it would raise the number of signatures required to 3 million! So this is quite a high bar in those terms.

For all those claiming an interest in moving to Finland, bear in mind that incomes here may be lower than those in the US and taxes are MUCH higher. Tax on purchases is now raised to 24% from the start of this year and income taxes are on a sliding scale and with other deductions from salary, can reduce one's income by a third.

Re: That 50,000 figure

That's absolutely amazing. I wish that idea was implemented in more countries. You don't really have direct democracy, since the representatives still have the final word, but in the same time it brings a huge influence from direct democracy into the republic, and lets citizens create their own laws, given enough support. Wonderful idea. How come we didn't hear about this earlier?

As a Finn I'm a bit flattered about all the positive comments of other people moving to Finland (jokingly but still). But just that you know Finland has some of the most restrictive copyright laws in the world except we donít have draconian 3 strikes laws. Our corruption, despite the entire global researcher which would suggest otherwise, is really deep in the system. Just to name a few examples of our political corruption, criticizing religion is banned but the law is only used to crush unorthodox public figures, parody and satire are not in the fair use (itís illegal to create a parody without compensation) and we have internet censorship. Especially Americans would have a hard time swallowing our socialistic government with its high taxation. Donít get me wrong Finland is a GREAT country to live and I love it but I just like to burst some over positive bubbles when I see some 
To the people wondering how the proposed law would affect international treaties, the proposal is within EU directives. Spain for example follows the same treaties and non-commercial warez is legal there. Not that the US wouldnít react to this proposal but it would still be legal by international laws. I really donít believe that the proposal would be singed to a law but it would be a great message to the government.

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But on the bright side you have the BEST (and I don't say that lightly) Education system in the World and your teachers are treated with the same if not more respect than Doctors (plus paid well too).

And an even more mind blowing thing for the yanks is that there are NO private schools. Though yeah taxes are high (then again Australian Income tax and Goods Tax's are high too) but the social benefits in some respects outweigh that.

Response to: FinnFag on Jan 25th, 2013 @ 12:01am

Criticizing religion is not banned, mocking religion is. A stupid law nevertheless.

Parody and satire are de-facto legal, but are not codified in law, but rely on court interprtations, something this proposal would fix.

And while taxation is high, you get (almost) free healthcare and free education all the way up to a phd. After high school you are actually paid to study. Then there's the 1 month of paid holiday a year, 9 months of maternity leave etc.

So if you hate socialism, Finland is pretty much a living hell and should be avoided at all costs..

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I think the answer comes a bit too late but here it is.

Winnie the pooh case caused a big uproar. It was in every newspaper and it was widely discussed. Even our culture minister commented on the case and said that this kind on action doesn't bring any respect towards copyright. CIAP (in our language TTVK) tried to spin the story every way they could but generally it was a big PR disaster.

If I remember the time stamps correctly, this law proposal is a descendant of that incident. My two cents on the case is that people are naive and have double standards. A lot more has happened to many people in the name of copyright and everybody knew that this could happen even to 2 year old children when the new copyright law passed. Now that a 9 year old actually gets the stick, well, now it's a problem. Not before and not in the future if the age of people being hunted doesn't come too low.